The President, an NBA fan, gets a few good jokes in as he celebrates the Spurs’ NBA championship.
Tag: Gregg Popovich
I drove down to San Antonio to attend the first game of the season with my Dad and watch the Spurs get their rings and unveil their fifth banner. I recorded the ceremony, and while I spent some time wrestling with the brightness settings on my phone, I managed to get some great moments (including a rare Gregg Popovich fist pump). Here’s what it looked like in the arena.
I’m on vacation in Chicago at the moment, so I’m largely offline. But just before I hit the road I made a wager that I want to record someplace persistent. With the 30th pick in the NBA Draft, the San Antonio Spurs selected Kyle Anderson from UCLA. If you look at Arturo Galletti’s Draft breakdown at BoxscoreGeeks, you’ll see that he was rated the 8th best prospect available by Arturo’s model. What’s more, he’s a forward-sized player who likes to have the ball in his hands and run the offense as a pass-first point guard. And he’s on the record as appreciating the Spurs style of play, and wanting to play for them. So all signs point to this being yet another Spurs draft-day steal. Arturo and I are both impressed with the pick.
Where we differ is in how much of an impact we think Anderson is likely to have next year. Arturo, presumably on the basis of Anderson’s numbers, thinks that he will become a rotation player with the Spurs immediately. I disagree. I think that (a) Gregg Popovich is historically slow to trust rookies who aren’t named Tim Duncan, and (b) if the Spurs manage to retain Boris Diaw and Patty Mills, then they will be bringing back a team that just won a championship and already know how to play together. With the team focus being to repeat as champions, and the oft-commented complexity of the Spurs system, I see Anderson as a deep bench player next year at best. I think he might even spend more time with the Toros than the Spurs. On Twitter, Arturo and I decided to bet a day’s charity work on Anderson’s minutes:
- If Kyle Anderson plays more than 1700 minutes for the Spurs, barring injury, Arturo wins. I put in a day for the charity of his choice.
- If Kyle Anderson plays fewer than 1200 minutes for the Spurs, barring injury, I win. Arturo puts in a day for the charity of my choice.
- If Kyle Anderson’s minutes are between 1200 and 1700, or he gets injured, or someone ahead of him in the lineup gets injured, it’s a push.
For my part, I feel like I’ll win either way. If Anderson plays the role I expect, I win the bet. If I lose the bet, it’s because my team got a new, young player who’s so good he forced his way into the rotation as a rookie on a championship team. I’ll be pleased with either outcome.
I’ve posted my own thoughts already, but after the jump is a whole mess of Spurs stuff that hit the internet after their championship.
There has never been a team like this before.
Over the course of the season–a season in which they had the best record in the NBA–no player averaged as many as 30 minutes a game. No player averaged as many as 20 points a game, though there were nine players that averaged between 8 and 17. The roster included eight international players, representing seven countries and four continents. They used 29 different starting lineups. There was a 38-year-old starter. There was a 22-year-old starter.
People talk about unselfish basketball. They talk about team-first basketball. They talk about the need to sacrifice individual achievement for the good of the group. These things are held up as lofty ideals that teams should strive for in an essentially star-driven league. But the 2013-2014 San Antonio Spurs embodied all of them, to such a degree that they will now be the measure by which such things are judged.
There were individual narratives, yes. There was Tim Duncan, becoming the first NBA player ever to start on championship teams in three different decades. There was Kawhi Leonard, emerging onto the national stage and joining Tim Duncan and Magic Johnson as the youngest Finals MVPs ever. There was Manu Ginobili, leading the Spurs comeback and silencing with thunderous authority those who said his career was over a year ago. There was Boris Diaw, waived by the worst team in NBA history, but a crucial starter on a championship team. There was Tony Parker, winning right next to him, the two of them best friends since they were teenagers in France, and coming right after they led their national team to Euroleague victory. There was Danny Green’s silky offense and suffocating defense, Patty Mills’s unfailing energy and scoring prowess, Tiago Splitter becoming the first Brazilian to ever win a ring. There’s R. C. Buford’s personnel, and Popovich’s plan. There were plenty of individual narratives.
But the most important narrative was the collective. This group of men suffered the most heartbreaking finals loss imaginable in 2013, and responded to it by trusting each other more, deferring to each other more, committing to the idea that the way forward was to forego personal accolades for team success. And when those choices led them again to the finals, against the same opponent, they produced the most crushing victory the NBA has ever seen. They set a record for shot-clock era Finals field goal percentage at 52.8%. They beat the Heat by an average 14 points a game, the largest average margin of victory in Finals history. They believed in each other, set records doing it, and emerged victorious.
I’ve run out of ways to describe how amazing this team was. But that hardly matters; they are a team for the ages. New things to say or no, I’ll be talking about them for the rest of my life.
I wasn’t able to watch this game live because I was stuck on a delayed airplane for the whole thing. But I watched it on video, and it was wonderful. The national coming-out party for Kawhi Leonard as a superstar. A fun note, given my comments on the BoxscoreGeeks show, is that Popovich declined to share what he said to Leonard before the game, citing, “family business.” Here’s the BBallBreakdown video for the game. As Arturo Galletti noted on Twitter, the Spurs are a couple missed free throws away from being up 3-0. On to game 4!
This week’s favstarred tweets.
https://twitter.com/ObiCynKenobi/statuses/472480567443726336
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I was at WisCon this weekend, so didn’t do my normal roundup of favorited tweets last friday. Here’s two weeks worth instead.
Baby changing station. pic.twitter.com/9K4yGiHNXV
— Renzo Soprano (@Renzo_Soprano) May 15, 2014
This video captures many of the things I adore about the San Antonio Spurs. [EDIT: The original video was taken down. I’ve switched it out with a mirror.]
What you wouldn’t learn from watching this wonderful video, though, is that for the first half of their era of dominance, the Spurs were thought of as offensively mediocre, but a defensive powerhouse. The reversal of perception over the last decade, despite having the same player core, is stunning. And it’s a credit to Gregg Popovich, who, as Nate Silver notes, has been “uniquely able to stave off regression to the mean.” Ian Levy picked up on that and observed that as his teams’ defensive effictiveness waned, it was nearly perfectly compensated for by increasing offensive prowess. (The trend lines in season ORTG+ and DRTG+ by season are perfectly parallel.) So it’s not just, as the video suggests, that the Spurs play perfectly executed team basketball. That’s what they do now, yes. But in the broader sense, what the Spurs under Gregg Popovich do, year after year, is play perfectly to their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
My favstarred tweets for this past week. As long as the Spurs are in the NBA Playoffs, these are likely to be basketball-heavy.
I’m not very good at talking about my novels until I’ve read the reviews.
JOSEPH HELLER#fiction #writing #writingroad— Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters) May 3, 2014